Harvard Professor to Present ‘Life in the Universe’

Abraham Loeb, chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University and founding director of the Black Hole Initiative, will present “Life in the Universe” on Thursday, July 6, 2017, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Gates Performing Arts Center on the Hawaii Preparatory Academy campus in Waimea.

Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the sun? Dr. Loeb will review the habitability of the universe throughout cosmic history from the birth of the first stars 30 million years after the Big Bang to the death of the last stars in ten trillion years.

Unless habitability around low mass stars is suppressed, life is most likely to exist near stars with a tenth of the solar mass ten trillion years from now. Forthcoming searches for bio-signatures in the atmospheres of transiting Earth-mass planets around nearby low mass stars will determine whether present-day life is indeed premature or typical from a cosmic perspective.